


Precious Few

by nonky



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-26 01:56:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6219109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonky/pseuds/nonky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lee had never thought of finally getting together with Kara in terms of loss instead of gain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Precious Few

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger Warning: Non-graphic portrayal of a miscarriage. 
> 
> Set season one, no spoilers other than character relationships.

He forgot he wasn't flying with her, outside Galactica with booming thrusters and trembling crushes of gravity as he spun near and away. 

Lee forgot he didn't quite have Kara Thrace or Starbuck. Love dazzled him. He welcomed the blur of reality for wishes. She was in his hands, Kara ground into his pores and practically injected into his veins.

It was a mistake. His pain was expected and hers was not. 

 

They left the flight deck, giddy and laughing. Kara was in front, as usual, leading the charge. She reached back and his hand was pulled up and around her, landing on a breast instead of her side as they skirted a sudden turn. His pause was flustered, but Kara's was a shiver he later realized was arousal. 

He'd just assumed flying made her nipples stiffen and her body flush pink at the throat and down her chest. When she led him to a miraculous, dusty and unused bunkroom, Lee realized she'd been giving him a world class strip tease every time they ended a CAP. 

 

"Hey, Lee?"

He glanced from paperwork, uneasy. They had tipped the scales balancing want and need. It felt scored into his forehead sometimes but it was his biggest secret. The small saving grace of privacy could salvage things if he just let Kara take the lead. He had promised himself he wouldn't bring it up until she did, giving him his cue.

"Hi." His smile was instinctual. He made it drop quickly. People watched them, only some of them kindly, for signs of intimacy that didn't fit with friendship. He tried not to spend hours locked up in his office anymore, just in case Kara was elsewhere seeking solitude and people assumed they were together.

"I might have a problem," she said quietly. "Are you on the shots?"

"Yeah, I had my last one-" He hadn't had any real romantic prospects since Caprica, but he was careful to present himself every six months for birth control. Except his memory was ticking past six months to more like seven. "I'm overdue by a couple weeks. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking."

Her grin was forced and she hadn't come around to his side of the table. Typically she was up in his space and reading his paperwork to pick flaws in his schedules and fuel budgets. The crumbs of affection had dried up, after the gluttony of dragging her underneath him and tasting every inch of her body.

"Who was? It's probably nothing. I'm not worried. See you later."

The worst thing about feeling so greedy was knowing it hadn't gone away. 

 

The flavour of her was just Kara. He tried to get a sense of it in words - because she did not appreciate half-assed efforts to eat her out - but his senses were drunk with his own daring. Kara's daring was more or less expected. She got a rodeo grip on the back of his head with one hand and played with her breasts with the other. 

He surprised a purr from her, a big sound that mellowed to riding his face until he nearly had to tap out for some air. She pulled him back, hand mussing up through his hair, skimming his blinking eyes and pushing his face away before he could make her come. 

 

Kara was avoiding him. She kept away from everyone, varying her schedule so wildly the only place he could ever find her was on the flight deck. Lee wasn't going to ask her there. He wasn't going to take that away from her. But he could read tension and fatigue in her shoulders. 

It's only a week, Lee told himself. I'll be spinning from this for years, minimum. I can give her a full week before asking her what's bothering her. If it lets her feel even a little better, I can give her two. 

He just wanted her to sleep in her bunk again. He wasn't sure if he was too worried she didn't sleep at all to not mind his worries she might be not sleeping with company.

 

The getting inside was flawless and required no thought and moving from there was - flying. They could fly without Vipers. They could spin and frak and she was wet as all Hades and . . . 

Lee recalled it, but again the words were not in existence to make it real. He'd never be able to tell the tale at the Triad tables, changing Kara's name to some common Caprican name. But then he'd never be able to tell it and do it justice without explaining Kara frakked him with blissful near violence. They wouldn't know what it meant to have her hold on to him like salvation and moan his name until he pounded into her and became flesh instead of stone. 

It would just sound like he was putting them into some ancient myth about gods and goddesses falling in love and creating the worlds. 

 

He was asleep when she pulled the curtain back to touch his hand. "Lee?"

"Mmmh? Kara?"

"I need you to get someone to cover my CAP," she whispered. "I'm bleeding a lot."

He sat up awkwardly, ducking the edge of his bunk. "What happened? Where?"

Lee was about to pat her down, look for wounds, and she gave him a very Starbuck look. He gasped and fumbled to his locker. 

"I'll go with you."

"You can't," she said. "You know what's happening. You can't change it. Everyone will know."

Appearances were so beneath him, Lee nearly scoffed aloud. It was only the ache of vulnerability in her hands clasped over her belly that made him hold in the sound. He had thought she wanted it, but now he knew she'd had time to love it. He was glad then he'd held out to the second week. 

"No," he whispered, drawing her closer. "If we are having a baby, I'll be there. If we are - losing a baby, I'll be there. It can be in the hallway, or behind the curtain or in the room with you. I'm no good to fly today."

Kara's ragged exhale was all the answer he was going to get. When she shuddered in pain, he realized he was seeing her so badly off she couldn't even argue her pride or her need to protect him from the parts of her personality tarnished with suffering.

 

"I can pull out," he had said, teeth chattering with the strain of holding back. "I'll pull out once you-"

"Frak that, fire all guns," she had said viciously, flipping them both so she was on bottom and had a mattress at her back to push off. Kara clamped him in her legs, braced her knees on the top bunk and killed him with a series of clenches that pulled his soul out his cock. "Permission to clear your throat."

He definitely made a very embarrassing sound, but he felt her mouth fall open on his shoulder and bite down. If they had been flying before, then they'd gone supernova. No wonder she'd gotten pregnant when that kind of energy let loose and found someone on the other side of the void to welcome it home. 

That kind of love ran on more love, and he had been secretly loving the idea of Kara's children since he'd met her. 

 

Lee spent a little time in all three places. He was the one to tell Cottle what they feared, and the one kicked out of Medbay briefly. He was called back in to hold Kara's hand through the closed curtain, while the Doc did something embarrassing and painful to keep her from getting an infection. He was shoved in afterwards, to sit with her as she lay weakly. The shadows under her eyes were purple smears telling him she might not have slept since he'd held her in the deserted bunkroom.

He wanted to wipe her eyes but he wasn't sure she knew she was crying. He didn't want to make her self-conscious. 

"Cottle can give you something for the pain," Lee told her. "You'll be able to sleep."

"I don't want to sleep now. What are we going to say?"

It was well into the morning shift on Galactica. The Commander knew there were two pilots in Medbay, and Lee knew Colonel Tigh wouldn't be delegated to visit and ask the details. They would have to face his father. Cottle was probably putting off the visit until he was satisfied his patient wouldn't up and bleed out to get away from the awkward conversation.

"I'm going to say we have suffered a loss," he said evenly. "I'm going to say we broke frat regs and you were hurt by my thoughtless actions. I'm going to remind him I'm your superior officer, and you are not to blame for what I get us into. And then I am probably going to go to hack, but not until you're feeling better. What can I do?"

Tears ran into her sweaty hair, making darker spots. He wanted to kiss her forehead when tears rolled faster even as she found a scrap of defiance. Lee was certain he would never value a woman who made his life easier. He found it endearing how she constantly tried to discard him for some imagined deficit in her own character. He would never be able to convince her how selfless she was with the people she loved.

"The Gods are punishing me for making a mistake. I don't deserve a child. I don't deserve you."

He would steal from the gods for her, but it wasn't necessary. The gods were supposed to bless unions and bring reconciliation from absence. It was in their best interests to have a thriving human race with all sorts of needy mortals asking favours. What else were gods going to do all their endless days? 

He was working on a list of favours, and one of them was another chance to father Kara Thrace's baby. Lee was veering dangerously close to a religious experience, but Kara had given him plenty of scares to push a conversion. The amount of bloody dressings he'd seen carried from her bedside as he sat screened away was just the most recent heartbreak.

"Unless Tigh is a god, I don't think so," he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. "I don't think we made a mistake. It wasn't our best plan, but I'm very, very fortunate to be with you even once. Next time, we pick our moment and have a baby. A cute one," Lee said, smiling painfully. "A really cute, really energetic, very happy baby, that might be a little familiar with hack by association."

Kara curled closer to him. She shifted and her mouth stretched taut. He stroked her hair off her neck and kissed her forehead to check for fever. 

"I'm sorry you're hurting," Lee said clearly. "I'm sorry for my part in it. I don't regret it, though. I don't want you to regret it because being with you is worth all the rest. So we'll be sad together, and we'll let my father yell, and we'll have a long talk about how soon we might want to have him babysit."

 

She dropped into slumber like someone born to dream a world instead of living a life. Her grip changed and she slackened to a sprawl. Kara did everything with her whole body, and she came to rest on his side with a bowed head reminiscent of prayer. 

Lee had stayed awake and thought of every moment he'd known her to decide how to keep her. She needed to be free to go when she panicked. He would let her flee, and be quietly in the background when she missed him.

He would let her dream her dreams of being unchanged and then help her accept they'd just been remade. 

 

"You think you have to be nice to me because you knocked me up," she grumbled a while later, coming awake with a wincing press to her belly. "I know when I'm being awful and I was never a good patient."

"I have to be nice to you because I love you," Lee told her peacefully. "And I like watching you torture Cottle. It cheers me up when I come in for those obnoxiously long needles he likes to give after we go down to a planet. I'd also like to marry you. I'll try nice first, then blackmail."

"Oh, good, I was worried you weren't going to be a gentleman about it," Kara mocked lightly. Her eyes went to the part in the curtain. "Commander."

Lee saw his father's gaze go to Kara's hand still bracing her sore body, and then to his hand in hers. "Sir, I'm not sure Kara is up for visitors right now."

"I'm not going to tire her," his father said hoarsely. "Kara, Dr. Cottle says you had a miscarriage?"

Despite Lee's grip on her hand, she stiffened and tried to sit up in the bed. "Yessir."

"No, I'll come to you," Adama told her. He picked up another chair and carried it to face Lee across the bed. His blue eyes fixed on his son. "Lee, was it yours?"

He nodded, sensing respect in the way his father took a beat to take in the news and nod slowly. "I'm sorry for your loss, son. Kara, you're going to be fine. Doc says there won't be lasting damage. I wish you didn't have to go through this tragedy. You're family, and we'll be here for whatever you need."

Lee was holding his breath, hoping the dressing down would be saved for him so Kara could have the day to simply heal. He watched his father lean back in the chair, the older man studying her pale features. He saw what he needed to find, because he sat forward and clasped her shoulder gently.

"President Roslin keeps a list of chaplains, high priestesses and other clergy in the fleet. I'm told most of them are familiar with memorials that some parents find comforting," he told them. "But there's no rush to decide."

Kara nodded, but her head was bowed as she rubbed at her eyes. Lee felt his own eyes sting and swayed as his own altered role was spoken. It made him feel steady even as the ache of loss kicked up stronger. He stood up and held her as she cried, under his father's silent empathy.


End file.
